They ruined his fur-ever.
The owner of the wallaby seized by authorities on the Coney Island boardwalk last week is heartbroken over the loss of his fuzzy friend.
“I had only been with him for one month, so it hurt when they took him,” 22-year-old Michael Gibbons said of the marsupial he spent $3,800 to obtain.
“Money doesn’t mean anything to me; I can pay back the money,” he lamented to The Post. “But I can’t get back an animal that I was just starting to have a relationship with.”
The Coney Island native, who’s studying psychology at Hunter College, was slapped with a $1,000 fine for possessing a wild animal before cops carted off with his beloved “Jackie Legs.”
Since Gibbons was little, his parents’ home has been a revolving door of pigs, lambs, lizards, and other creatures – including at least five parrots throughout the years, Gibbons said.
“People in my neighborhood call me ‘Doctor Dolittle’ and give me animals,” Gibbons explained.
Last month, Gibbons bought nine-month-old Jackie Legs for $2,500 from a wallaby breeder in Wisconsin – and dished out an extra $1,300 for an exotic pet transportation company to drive him to New York. He declined to name the businesses.
He looked back on his month with Jackie Legs with fondness – and insisted that the pouched creature native to the Australian Outback was adapting well to Brooklyn’s concrete jungle.
“I assume people are probably thinking that I was keeping him in an apartment, in a small area, and like, not taking him outside. … But he had a front yard, he was outside and he had a lot of places to roam,” a devastated Gibbons said.
The duo’s daily routine included strolling around Coney Island on the weekends and Washington Square Park on the weekdays, with the joey often tucked cozily into a little bag, he recalled.
When curious passersby asked to hold or take pictures with Jackie, Gibbons requested they provide a donation in exchange.
“With the money we accumulated, I used to buy him food and vet care and stuff like that,” Gibbons insisted.
Just one day before Jackie Legs was seized on Coney Island, cops in Washington Square Park warned Gibbons about the law against owning a wild animal such as a wallaby – but he brushed them off.
“The website I looked at said they were legal,” Gibbons said.
Jackie Legs is now at a Long Island wildlife preserve, where he seems happy and healthy, a facility director told The Post this week.
But Gibbons isn’t giving up: “I am going to do everything I can to get him back,” he said.
